[aur-dev] pkgbase queries via RPC interface

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2014 at 21:04:05, kachelaqa wrote:
> [...]
> The only other thing that can't be fully implemented on the client side 
> is negation. It's possible to exclude terms if they are combined with at 
> least one other positive term. For instance, to search for "foo" AND NOT 
> "bar", you can first search for "foo" and then do some post-filtering on 
> the client side to exclude "bar". But what if you wanted to search for 
> *all* packages that do not contain "bar"? This is currently impossible, 
> because you'd need to pull the entire package list before it could be 
> filtered on the client-side. So I would like to suggest adding something 
> like an "narg" parameter to complement the "arg" parameter, to allow for 
> the possibility of a list of terms to be excluded from the search results.
> [...]

Just out of curiosity, can you give an example of such a negative query
that would result in a result set with less than 5000 packages? I am
asking because queries with results of more than 5000 packages fail.

Having said that, I think that having something like narg is a good
idea. It is easy to implement and has real use cases.